Investor says Ireland is 100 percent better than it was two years ago

Kennedy Wilson, a major buyer of Irish properties and one of Bank of Ireland's biggest shareholders, has stated that Ireland has improved "100 percent" in the last two years.

"And if you think back to when we first started looking, Ireland, as I've said, is a 100 per cent better place than it was two years ago -- both psychologically and economically," Kennedy Wilson boss William McMorrow told investors last week, according to the Irish Independent.

Last year the California based company joined with Fairfax and Wilbur Ross to buy a 35 percent stake in Bank of Ireland in a €1.1bn deal and it hooked up with Deutsche Bank to buy a €1.3bn portfolio of loans from Bank of Ireland.

McMorrow said he was confident that the Irish market would improve over the course of the next three years.

"If you can kind of take a perspective of looking out three years, maybe five, but three for sure, you don't have any new construction going on there," he said.

"And so if you've got a growing user base of these companies that are continuing to grow, they've got a really great education system in Ireland, and it's particularly not only the tax rates, but it's attractive to particularly these US companies, half the population in Ireland is under 35.

"And so it's the only EU country I think in the last 10 years that's got a positive population growth," he said.

He added, "When you look at all of those factors -- and with no new construction -- it's my opinion that three to five years from now, you're going to actually see higher rental rates in the office market as well as what's clearly happening in the apartment market."